


You Have Brown Eyes, I Have Blue

by glassofwater



Series: Batfam stuff [4]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Blood, Canonical Character Death, Death, Dick Grayson Feels, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, Dick Grayson is Not Okay, Earth-3 Crime Syndicate (DCU), Existentialism, Gen, Injury, gun shot wound
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:34:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29680575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glassofwater/pseuds/glassofwater
Summary: Dick comforts a dying civilian. He wishes he didn't have to lie to do so.
Series: Batfam stuff [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2058762
Comments: 6
Kudos: 49





	You Have Brown Eyes, I Have Blue

“You’re going to be okay. I promise.”

That’s what he says. What he swears. The dying man, hardly a man, couldn’t be a man, he’s barely an adult, he’s so young, _so young,_ only nods his head at the lie. It’s a sure movement, confident and trusting, and Dick has to force his mouth shut in order not to take it all back.

The asphalt is cold, it’s barely eleven thirty, but there are no stars or street lamps to help soothe the roughness of it all. The ink that oozes out and stains the black is staining his suit as well. It coats his hands and fingers, breaks through his knees, slides under his feet. Despite the pebbles that press into his shins, Dick can only focus on how soft and slick blood is.

Blood is soft.

“My name’s John,” the young man offers. Red stains his teeth in a grin that reminds Dick of his own. “Nice to meet you, sir, uh, Nightwing.”

He knows he’s not really supposed to listen to the scanners. Old habits die hard, and even though Batman’s disapproval is almost enough to keep him away, Dick’s fingers still twitches to his retired radio. It’s how he got here. It’s why he’s here now.

“Hi, John,” is all he can really offer, too focused on keeping his hands in position. Too focused on trying to slow the stream, the bubble of life that keeps pouring out. Upper left side of the sternum. Exit wound out from the third left rib. Estimated time of sixty, maybe ninety seconds, since the shot. Too late. Too late.

“My sister’s name is Rita,” John says, and his eyes are wandering across Dick’s masked face. “She’s thirteen.”

Dick nods. Digs his fingers into the small hole further. The ambulance is maybe two minutes out. Maybe more. The call only just came in.

“What’re you doing?”

Finally, Dick shifts. John has brown, unremarkable eyes. “I’m stemming the blood flow. You were shot.”

“Really?” John is genuinely surprised. “When?”

Dick presses his hands down a little harder. “A few minutes ago. Tell me more about your sister, John.”

“Why was I shot? Who did it?”

“I don’t know,” Dick responds. “You said Rita was thirteen?”

John smiles, eyes scrunching up. “Yeah,” he sighs. “She’s going to turn fourteen next month. An actual teenager.” He adds, softer, “She’s growing up too fast.”

“I know the feeling,” Dick agrees, thinking of his own teenager. Damian, indeed, was growing up too fast. He was almost up to his shoulder now. “Any plans for a birthday party?”

The blood isn’t stopping despite the pressure. It keeps seeping through his fingers, a warm envelope compared to the dry cold.

“She wants-” John coughs, chest caving. “She wants to go to Disney World. Go see Mickey Mouse.”

“That sounds like fun,” Dick cheers, trying to calculate how much time is left. John’s green coat is soaked, drenched, and Dick knows if he were to squeeze the front, it would dribble. 

John jerks his head and his eyes are roaming. There is little color in his face, lips parted in desperate gasps. The shock from before is steadily going away. The adrenaline is leaving, but everything else is fixed in place.

“Am I,” his voice cracks, “Am I dying?”

“No,” Dick reassures. “You’re going to be fine.” He presses down harder.

John whimpers. “Stop, stop. That _hurts.”_

 _“_ I know,” Dick soothes. “Everything is going to be okay, John. Look at me. You’re going to be okay.”

A lie.

The younger man doesn’t look at him though and he bites his lip, squeezing his eyes shut. “I can’t feel my hands,” he admits. “I-I don’t feel very good.”

“Help is almost here, John.”

Another lie. He can hear the orders going back and forth in his ear. There’s traffic. It’ll be another three minutes until an ambulance is free.

“Just stay calm. Deep breaths. Breathe with me, okay? In and out.”

John is trying his best to copy the exaggerated movements, lungs stuttering and shaking. The panic is setting in though. The panic and the desperation.

“What am I gonna tell Rita?” he asks like he’s expecting an answer. “What am I gonna tell mom?”

Dick doesn’t know. 

“We were-- We were all gonna go together, you know? She’s turning fourteen but she still wants me around and I don’t understand _why_ but-”

John coughs again. It’s weak. 

“I’m scared,” he whispers. “What’s going to happen to me?”

Dick opens his mouth again to spew some half-hearted reassurance or answer that’s just lies with a pretty bow atop. He stops though. John is staring at him with dirty brown eyes. There’s nothing special about them. Nothing notable. There are no flecks of gold or amber in them that catch the light. There’s no stony wall of indifference built behind them. The whites of his eyes are splattered with burst vessels and strain, and they hide nothing.

But John has brown eyes that stare at him, stare into his soul, and beg for honesty. Truth.

Dick can’t bring himself to use harsh words though. Can’t bring himself to form the sentence ‘ _You’re going to die,’_ because that’s cruel and too blunt and death is so personal. Dying is too intricate to be put like that. You can’t explain death.

Dick’s died before. Only a minute or two of complete nothingness, but death nonetheless. He remembers the moments leading up to it more vividly than he does the moments after. His body hurt, ached in a way that he was sure he’d never feel the same again. His throat was sore, deep gouges and scratches still oozing blood. He could barely see out of his left eye, nearly swollen shut, and his wrist were throbbing. 

Most of all, though, Dick remembered suffocating. Remembered Luthor’s clean, _clean_ face. There wasn’t a speck of dirt or blemish on that man. His teeth were a perfect white and his eyes were filled with apathy. Luthor’s metal gauntlet smelled like oil, and he could sometimes taste it on his tongue during the worst nights. The pill was small, shoved down his throat so efficiently, but the very idea of medicating like that again leaves him shivering.

He struggled. He did. Dick struggled as much as he could, muscles screaming and heart crying out. At some point, he recalls looking for Bruce. Looking for a small comfort in his despair. A familiar face to ease the panic.

There was only Luthor though. Luthor and his pearly white teeth and apathetic eyes. 

His lungs had burned and it had spread to the rest of his body like he was on fire. Dick’s last moments, his death, his murder, was filled with nothing but horror and pain.

Dick hadn’t wanted to die. Dick hadn’t wanted to know he was going to die. There was no hope with that. No sense of faith for another outcome. Fruitless as it may have been, Dick had wanted to dare for a savior.

No, Dick would not be cruel. He could not be.

“Nightwing?”

His name is hardly a breath out in the open air. The wheezes have stopped. Blood still pours and pours and pours. His suit is stained. The ground is soaked.

“It’s not scary,” Dick says, leaning closer. It’s truthful, this time. Dying wasn’t scary. Everything up until death was. “It’s like falling asleep.”

“I’m not ready,” John rushes to say. “I--I don’t wanna be alone.”

His eyes keep flickering closed, slowly fluttering open every few seconds. Carefully, cautiously, Dick removes his hands. Alleviates the pressure. There is an awful suctioning noise as he releases his fingers from the wound. John doesn’t notice.

“You won’t be,” Dick whispers, taking the other man’s trembling hand into his. “I’m here. You won’t be alone.”

“You said it’s like falling asleep?” His voice is hardly a rasp. “I go to sleep and it’ll all be just a dream?”

Death was a dream for Dick. A nap in oblivion. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and then opened them and _gasped_. That was it.

“Yeah, just a dream. That’s all it is.”

“And after...” John trails off, pausing for such a long time that Dick doesn’t know what to do except to continue to hold his hand. He speaks up again though, eyes flickering to find opaque lens staring back at him. “What happens after?”

There’s a wailing in the distance, close enough where the high pitched whines sound like hope and the flashing blue and red lights look like safety. There’s too much life around him though. Too much of it leaking into the asphalt and draining out of that green winter coat. John stopped shaking awhile ago. His grip lessened, and even though his eyes were meeting Dick’s own, Dick knows that he was no longer seeing.

On some level, Dick knows it’s too late. It was already too late when he arrived. John, this man that barely looked over twenty one, with a chipped tooth and boring brown eyes and a thirteen year old sister named Rita, had the misfortune of Nightwing arriving too late.

“After?” Dick repeats, squeezing the man’s hand. “Well, that’s the easy part. After, you wake up.”

He doesn’t see the exact moment brown eyes become dull, doesn’t look at his watch to confirm the precise second of when John takes his last breath, but he does know that sirens flood the dim street thirty seconds later and that it is much too late to do a thing about it.

He lets go of John’s limp hand, briefly considers wiping his gloves onto his already smeared suit, and allows two paramedics to swarm the quickly cooling body. He waits for police to arrive, watches as they drape a black tarp over Rita’s older brother’s body, and declare it a homicide. Even throughout the questioning, of which they let him off relatively easy considering the sheer volume of-- of _life_ splattered all over him, Dick lets them do their jobs.

He leaves with little fanfare, grappling away from the scene and flipping through rooftops.

The radio in his belt feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. The static in his comm is loud and screeching, and for a moment, Dick entertains the notion of flinging it out into the night. Throwing the cheap device into darkness, watch it plummet and shatter. 

The sirens are soft, muffled with distance, but the taste in his mouth takes him back as if he never left. Copper. Oil. Dirt. His own sweat. A dry pill.

See, the thing is, Dick isn’t very good about being honest. He’s tongue and cheek most of the time, quipping and tossing around puns as distractions and ice-breakers. When people go to him for guidance, they aren’t looking for his honest thoughts. They’re looking for leadership. They’re looking for advice that’ll help them through their trials. Most of the time, they just want hope.

John was looking for hope.

Call him an optimist. Call him a pessimist. At the end of the day, there’s still water in the cup, and that’s all that matters, right?

Dying was not like falling asleep. It wasn’t taking a little nap and floating in forever. You don’t wake up from death. It wasn’t a dream that you don’t remember after opening your eyes. It wasn’t a nightmare that leaves your heart beating out of your still chest.

Death was nothing. Nothing.You aren’t supposed to come back from nothing.

You aren’t supposed to wake up either, and yet here he was. 

Dick isn’t very good about telling the truth. He’s a very good liar. A good actor. Manipulative, some would say. He prefers to see the other half of the coin. He doesn’t like the darkness or the grim. He tolerates it all, yes, but he’s a good liar. Good enough to fool himself.

Sometimes, Dick wonders if he ever actually woke up.

Thoughts like these are dangerous. They lead down a rabbit hole that’s difficult to claw out of. He’ll do it again, shovel through his own thoughts until his nails are broken off and the tips of his fingers are raw, but he can’t let himself _ever_ succumb to it all again. 

Death wasn’t like a dream, but it took all the same. It took memories from him. Those short, precious, important minutes he spent dead took away a lot of things. And he gets so _angry_ when he can’t remember the good things.

He gets so furious when he has trouble recalling his first birthday at the Manor. He feels an unbridled rage when he doesn’t know off the top of his head when Jason got adopted. These dangerous and purging flickers of loathing for himself shove everything else aside when Tim talks to him about certain missions that he _knows_ he should know like they happened yesterday, and yet even the thoughts of it are fuzzy and woven with cob webs.

He’ll never forgive himself for forgetting what it was like to hug Damian for the first time.

Death, trauma, it all stole from him, but he was also lucky enough to _wake up._

Blink. Gasp. Breathe. Taste ash and inhale smoke.

John had brown eyes. Rita is turning fourteen next month. 

The radio call requested emergency services for a neighborhood disturbance at eleven twenty five. Nightwing arrived on scene at eleven twenty eight.

The blood under his fingernails will take three showers to get out.

John bled out and his life now stained every part of Dick Grayson.

These are things Dick will remember. 

Death is not a dream, so this is the price for making it one.


End file.
